The End of a School Librarian

Things, we’re constantly told, are tough all over, especially for libraries, and especially especially for school libraries, which are under attack around the country, and not just in places where they’ve changed the name so "school media center." I hope those school media specialists are doing okay, because I’m not going to comment on their plight. They can start an Annoyed School Media Specialist blog and see how far they get.

Anyway, back to troubled libraries. A kind reader sent on this story from Franklin, MA. The principal of the Franklin High School decided to save a little money and get rid of the school’s librarian. The library will become a "technology center," but according to the principal will still "function as a library," by which he apparently means students can still check out books there, not that a "technology center" is likely to have many books, but we all know the kids today don’t need books, just well designed videogames.

Based upon the article, it might be just as well, because Franklin High couldn’t have had a very good library. For one thing, it was disorganized, if we go by the description of the article. Apparently the books were just piled willy-nilly all over the place.

"Part of the transformation involves physically restructuring the library by subject." Restructuring the library by subject? No why didn’t librarians think of that! One wonders how the library was structured before. Perhaps by book size or color? Lots of library patrons would be happy with that, since they want to see that book again, the big blue one, the one that was near that other book on that subject that’s just on the tip of their tongue. But in general, that would be a bad way for a school library to be organized.

"It will more closely resemble the layout of a Barnes & Noble bookstore, so all math resources will be in one section, all science in another, for instance, Light said."Hmmm . I’ve never been in the Franklin High library, but maybe you have. Were the math resources not together before? What sort of library has them scattered all over the place! I think Principal Light should be thanked for finally organizing that collection! Or else he should be criticized for not setting foot in the library before, or else not noticing that it already was organized. This is an empirical question.

Apparently the kids in Franklin, Mass. are as dumb as those folks using southwestern libraries who can’t master the Dewey Decimal System. Since they’ll no longer have a librarian to pass on the byzantine and almost totally incomprehensible structure that is the DDC, making everything like a bookstore is probably for the best.

"’One of the things that strikes everyone when you walk into Barnes & Noble is, it’s intuitive. We’re setting up the library very much in that fashion,’ said Light." Personally, I think all schools should be modeled on commercial box stores. The teachers could all be paid minimum wage, and perhaps they could add greeters at the front door to make the whole school experience more welcoming.

Having shopped in a few Barnes & Noble’s myself over the years, I have to wonder why anyone would think they were intuitive, or at least any more intuitive than a library. If you go to a library to work on a school project, you want the books related to that subject, right? A well designed library will get you from the front door to the subject specific materials you need as quickly as possible.

That’s not how Barnes & Noble bookstores work, not even in Massachusetts. Bookstores put sale items, bargain books, journals, coffee mugs, and other random crap in the front of the store hoping you’ll buy things on impulse. And just try finding a specific history book, even if the store has it.

I can almost see that thinking in a suburban public library. After all, most people aren’t using suburban public libraries for research. For most of them, the main difference between their public library and the local Barnes & Noble is that the library is free and has less comfortable furniture. But in a school library? There’s nothing intuitive about the organization of a bookstore for research purposes, and one has to wonder if anyone who thinks that has ever done any actual research. But what can you expect when two bureaucrats and a theater teacher design the place.

The students there probably didn’t do much research before, anyway, so what does it matter if they do less now.

I see by the principal’s blog that he’s also gotten rid of some art and music, so the library counts as part of those unimportant subjects schools love to cut. The students might not have any understanding of art, music, or research, but at least they’ll all be able to check out laptops and sit in "learning pods" while watching teachers write on Smart Boards. The students were most likely going to be bored in school anyway, so now they can be bored in learning pods and not blame all the boredom on the librarian.

Great. Public libraries will pick up the slack for this too. And, we don’t have the staff either. I wish libraries weren’t insanely busy, but they are. I wonder if any of these schools are cutting sports’ programs. While I’m all for exercise, are sports really necessary?

Could this be the librarian’s fault? In fact, could it be the library school’s fault? I received my esteemed MLS in 2007 from an esteemed library school. I cannot remember a course on marketing the library, or writing proposals/grants, or any other course to further efforts to ensure continued life of the library. If a librarian won’t even put books in catagorical order, then of couse the library and the librarian are of no use. Duh.

Could this be the librarian’s fault? In fact, could it be the library school’s fault? I received my esteemed MLS in 2007 from an esteemed library school. I cannot remember a course on marketing the library, or writing proposals/grants, or any other course to further efforts to ensure continued life of the library. If a librarian won’t even put books in catagorical order, then of couse the library and the librarian are of no use. Duh.

I agree with the sports comment. You never hear of a sports program being cut out due to budget problems. Unless you are another Michael Jordan, academics will get you a lot farther in life than sports.

Barnes and Noble intuitive? Not so much to my way of thinking. Anything slightly out of the ordinary (i.e., not fiction) can be impossible to find without staff assistance and most of the staff can be found at the cash registers.

And if the school library was as disorganized as the prinicipal says, then shame on the “librarian” who was dismissed.

Libraries have been on their way to obsolescence since my library school days in the 80s. Gate counts, database stats, reference desk stats, classes taught, books circulated – they go up every academic year. The miracle is that we continue to do more and more with less and less. People that is.

Um. If the books were ‘scattered willy nilly’, doesn’t that maybe mean that they were being.. um.. USED? So. No librarian, but students can still check out books? Students: “Yaaayyy!! Free books!”

And an aside: I just love how art and music are the first things to be cut. Then people complain that their friends can’t understand a map or imagine a route if given directions; and Americans remain famous the world over for the complete inability to correctly pronounce any non-American English words — and some of the American English ones as well. Geez. “Teaching kids to draw” or “teaching kids to sing” is *so* not the sole (or even, necessarily, the *main*) purpose of art and music education. It’s a brain-development thing.

So,we have students graduating from high school who are so inarticulate they can’t speak in sentences, don’t know where Canada is on a map of North America, and think the Civil War began in 1940, and yet they fired the librarian!

“So,we have students graduating from high school who are so inarticulate they can’t speak in sentences, don’t know where Canada is on a map of North America, and think the Civil War began in 1940, and yet they fired the librarian!”

If that’s the best they can do with a librarian working there, I say, fire the whole lot of them. Besides which, why does it matter if I know that Canada is the biggest island in the world.

The last two comments make me wonder: was it teachers or unorganized librarians who caused the problems known on NBC as Jaywalkers?

There are so many shameful aspects attached to our educational system in this country. Libraries, the fine arts, reading, writing, and understanding – all undervalued in public school systems. But sports continue to receive funding. sigh …

This is very interesting to me, particularly since I used to live in Franklin, and their public library touts itself as the first public library in the country (although it never came up in a History of Libraries course I took, but I think there are several “first public libraries” in the country – the first fully free one, one that was originally open to a certain society, etc..)

In any case, I work in a prep school library, but fortunately we are a huge feeder to the Ivy League and basically have more money than God, so… this is never going to happen here. If we can’t even make minor leaps into the 21st century (an on-going frustration) we will not be turning our lovely library into a Barnes & Noble. And in whose world is B&N intuitive? Nevermind that things are actually scattered around… let’s pretend everything is grouped by category. There’s no rhyme or reason to where the various categories are placed. I might know I need to go to “World Travel,” but then I have to find signs to point me in that direction. And, I have to say, I think this is doing a huge disservice to students who will be going to college and having to deal with LC classification. Even if the DDC is very different from LC, it’s pretty much the same process to find the book once you have the call number. These kids will be lost when they get to college, even more so than they usually would be.

TruTexan – I too got my MLIS in 2007 from an esteemed school (really… like an honest to goodness highly-ranked research university!) We actually DID have a marketing course, although I did not take it since I have no interest in public libraries and we don’t need to market our academic library since classes meet here and force the kids to make use of it. So these courses do exist….

I have less of a problem with the fact that they fired the librarian. Many public schools in the US do not hire MLIS librarians, and in Canada, it is unheard of for school librarians to need an MLIS. I’m sure this place will still be staffed, and you don’t need to be a librarian to do the job in most public school libraries.

Um…. the comment that suggested it was crazy to fire the librarian since we have kids lacking basic knowledge really seems to miss the point that it’s the TEACHERS who are supposed to teach the kids that stuff. I had a great public education with great teachers and got into a very selective college. We did use the school library for some term papers that everyone does in 10th and 12th grades. But it wasn’t the library or anything to do with the library that taught me the vast majority of what I learned in school.

Right on Al the principal just goes to prove my continuing fear that as less “educated” people get exposed to libraries the more we will get people who cant find their way out of a paper bag with a call number. Dewy and LOC are not complicated at all the library layout might be but not the system. It shows how intellectual lazy people are. I feel sorry for the librarian who is getting this type of treatment!

I don’t like the changes they made. But Post Postmodern… first of all, the principal here is likely to have just as much education as any librarian, with plenty of exposure to libraries in his or her education. And, what they’re doing here with reorganizing seems to be in an attempt to make the library EASIER to use (it’s debatable if this would work) and more attractive to students. You seem to be advocating keeping the ‘riff-raff’ out by keeping a system which is confusing to many. If ‘educated’ people are involved, they’ll recognize the superiority of current classification systems and traditional library models. Librarian = educated and superior, anyone else who doesn’t like the system = uneducated and stupid. Let’s face it – most school libraries are ONE room. They do not usually have huge collections. They are considerably smaller than any Barnes & Noble. Arranging books as they are arranged in bookstores would probably actually work just fine on such a small scale, although I don’t think it’s a great idea. But I do think there are valid arguments to be made for new classification systems and new library models. I don’t know why people are so attached to the word ‘library,’ either.

“Having shopped in a few Barnes & Noble’s myself over the years, I have to wonder why anyone would think they were intuitive, or at least any more intuitive than a library.”

I’m with you on this one AL, 100%. Not only do I have a tough time finding things I want at B&N (AND other chain bookstores), but whenever I wait in line and ask one of their helpful teenagers for assistance, the kids check their computers and walk me back to the very shelves I was just looking at and go “Umm, well, it ought to be around here somewhere….”

Would it kill me to proofread? Nope. I try to proofread; I guess I’m just not very good at it. This might be the one downfall of my having editorial control over the blog. And Chip is generally much too busy massaging my feet or making martinis to proofread, the poor dear.

I think one of the saddest things in all this is the loss of a refuge. Growing up, the school library was a place of quiet and calm in the high school. I doubt a ‘technology center’ will offer the same feeling.

Why must there be just one or the other? A library is a library. A computer lab is a computer lab. They are two different places with two different purposes. Every time I hear of a fellow librarian losing their job, it’s as sad as hearing another fairy lose its wings after someone says “I don’t believe in fairies.”

Seems to be a lot of people saying “I don’t believe in libraries” these days. And there they go–another librarian bites the dust.

Techserving, I understand the idea of change but not change just to say you changed. I learned to use Dewy when I was about 10, LOC with in the first month being in college. How did I do that? I went to the library. Both systems are so easy a caveman can use them. Just people dont want to try and librarians are giving up so they can go play WII. My argument isnt that the principal is an idiot well not this time. I am with people who do not think book stores are good models for change. Shocking I know but not everything that is different from a library is better then a library. There is article in Museum May-June issue (a far better magazine then LJ) by their Museum 2.0 writer thats really go and applies directly to libraries and this issue. Like a few have said a book stores are about selling items not finding knowledge. They are designed to attract the seller to the pretty books and shiny objects. It doesnt matter they actually dont carry most of things you need but wow look at least you bought a book, a coffee mug a cd and some chocolate coffee beans. Ok I ranted enough Techserving keep doing what your doing because you know what is best for you community I ll go age gracefully and keep the next batch of 20 somethings out of a job

As a 32 year old tech savy librarian (webmaster) I wonder if librarians in general will be able to compete with IT professionals for the jobs of the future. As a profession from the ALA to MLS programs it seems we don’t really have an answer. How many sys admins really gleaned the best skills for their jobs from their library/information science degree? It may be time for me to work on a master’s in CS, really just to keep my job. Maybe I’m being overly grim. What do you think?

To Can We Compete? I wouldn’t waste time getting a masters in CS. My brother works in the IT field, and he is going for an MBA to get out of it. I didn’t go into libaries to stare at a computer all day. I’d rather go back and get a nursing degree if anything.

B&N frustrates the heck out me because I can rarely find those odd items that straddle subject categories. Finding someone to help is difficult and my B&N doesn’t provide a computer for customers to look up items on their own. Terrifically frustrating.

Here in the library? Our students aren’t stupid but a good many are LAZY. They don’t want to be taught how to use the library. They want me to do their research for them – after all, they are paying for their “education.” These are the same kids who expect a B just for showing up and participating in class. That they failed every exam or didn’t complete the paper matters not. These entitled kids hovered over by doting parents make our lives a lot harder than they need to be.

I think the comment about a lack of intellectual curiosity is the key. Kids and people in general seem to be tending more towards dependent entitlement and less towards doing it yourself and earning it. Unfortunately, we cannot force a desire to learn or a desire to be self-sufficient. I think I got into the library profession too late and might just someday be the Last Librarian on earth.

Frankly, I am astounded that there has been nary a comment about the coming of the Tech Center and the demise of the librarian marking the end of support for literacy development at Franklin HS — and here I refer to reading, cultural, information, and visual literacy (and maybe a few others I cannot think of at the moment, but all of which owe much to libraries, librarians, and library resources).

Some comments are certainly to the point; for too long, and to too many fellow librarians’ consternation, I have been pleading a case for changing not only our professional title, but also the name of the institution where we work to anything that does not use the root libra-. It has been years since we were depositories for just books! Community Commons (or C squared for short) seems to fit the new definition of what it is we do. We are about books, but we are also about technology, shared information of ALL sorts, people coming together for meetings, instruction, and social occasions, children, seniors, and everyone in-between. Community can be broadly defined as a geographic area, a social, cultural, religious, ethnic, learning, or other group — whatever floats your boat in the particular instance.

I believe, as do many of you, that we are endangering our future if we do not think more broadly about what we do, who we service, and our reason for being — none of which are necessarily included in the ancient word “library.”

The developments in Franklin frighten me, frankly. I work with school-aged patrons, and their ignorance about access to information; their preposterous satisfaction with the first (and most easily) found bit of information that remotely answers their question; their teachers’ dumbed down expections for anything better from their students; and, most frightening, their absolute lack of curiosity, tenacity, and perseverence about exploring what is out there for them to explore are nothing short of jaw-dropping scary. If you don’t work with adolescents, drop by a public library’s YA section or a school library sometime. You are not likely to find many YA’s there — except those using the computers, of course, and then it is usually to check their email, facebook, myspace, or twitter account, or “type” their homework. After they leave, check the trash basket for discarded printouts of their homework. Like here, you will find appalling grammatical and spelling errors, but worse yet, you will find little in the text that testifies to their ability to think logically, write well, or express themselves cogently. I kid you not; some write passably, but they are few and far between.

I will stop here because I know there are plans afoot in Washington to fix the problems with our educational system, as there are to correct the rest of the problems that ail the United States. Allow me to get my old-fashioned No.2 pencil back between my teeth and bite down even harder this time.

I’ve been teaching people how to find information, do research for nearly 30 years. When I found myself job hunting a couple years ago, I found lots of school library postings in this city. I wasn’t “qualified” because I lacked a teaching certificate. My education and background were deemed more than sufficient for a doctorate-granting university that wanted me to teach library research skills. I’m doing this and many of my students are in the School of Education. Working with those young people, I have grave doubts about the future of America’s schools. I’m not saying every future teacher is on the dumb side, but there are enough who cannot spell, write or communicate who will be getting jobs in our school systems. The least able trying to educate our children – it’s pretty darn terrifying.

I find it interesting that people are calling patrons lazy. To play devils advocate for a moment, let me stipulate this: it’s human nature. We look at our goal (find info), we go achieve that goal (get the info) and we’re done. Now in our caveman days, if someone said “go get meat”, you would go out and get any meat. If sausage and fillet mignon equally accomplish the task, and sausages are easier to get than the fillet mignon, in the future you will only go for the sausage if the parameters are the same – you save your resources for something else. Now if sausage (the first answer) gave you a C, and fillet mignon (two, three, four, five info sources) got you an A, then most students would trend toward going out and getting a fillet mignon.

If a fillet mignon was the only possible way to get a minimum grade (i.e. info sources just get you a C, what you do with them gets you the B or the A) then more people would go out and get more info sources for their projects. This type of mentality needs to be cultivated in our students. You can’t blame them for not helping them get to that stage.

Dr. Pepper I agree with you and I know somewhere in there I am at fault but I have not found a solution. Tossing the Pandora’s box of the Internet is not a solution indeed it might be part of the solution. There is just not a drive for the education. I have seen the teaching students Evensong are talking about, It scares me too. The whole system not just libraries are broken. I would gladly call myself information commons if it ment people were getting information and not on Social Networks. That brings me to the issue of social info or crowd sourcing. Deep down I feel this is the issue its just not being done right. Maybe we should teach crowd sourcing literacy instead of information literacy. or put into information literacy. I dont think we can get rid of it. Sorry just ramblings that have been in my head

Re: some earlier comments – I wouldn’t be so quick to blame this librarian for her library’s fate. I don’t know the particulars, but in my own case, I never had the resources – human, financial or technological – to make my library the well-oiled, user-friendly machine I wanted it to be.

In my experience, and I speak as one whose old library is being given the bookstore treatment, when the powers that be – whether they are school principals or in my case, senior executives in a Fortune 500 firm – decide that the library in its current iteration is useless and would serve its clientele better if it were more like a B&N – nothing you learned in any marketing class is going to help you. Hell, in my case, the executives weren’t even interested in hearing from the patrons themselves, and their goal was to make the library “customer focused”. Figure me that one.

It is a waste of time and energy to try to fight that kind of irrationality. Appealing to intelligence and reason is futile when you’re dealing with idiots. I tried, but got nothing but grief, so I left. Better to step aside, get out of there, and watch it fail from a distance. Only when their redesigned library-not-library falls flat on its face and hits them in the wallet or the test scores or whatever metrics they use to measure success, will they see the light. It’s the only language they understand.

I too find it disturbing to say the least. As an ex-librarian (got fired for NOT turning my library into the “in demand” book store like atmosphere he wanted, his programs and suggestions sucked. He knew what he was doing because he had an MBA), I find that more and more, the public wants the “library” to be like their favorite bookstore. Give them coffee, free donuts and unlimited time on the computers and they will be happy. No one is there to learn or do research, especially not the young people. Most of the youth that do come in only want to get on the computer and play games or socialize. Librarians and the library itself has lost it’s value to the communities. Wonder where they will all go when the school libraries and public libraries are both closed? I don’t think that B&N or any other bookstore will care whether or not they learn anything as long as they buy something. I’m afraid that my grand children will not know what my career was for at all. Oh, and who says that the librarian at Franklin was female? Couldn’t they have been male?

when I worked at a 35,000-volume High School library in SoCal in the ’80s and early ’90s, the school district had already cut the number of librarians from 4 to 1. The year after I relocated, which was itself the year after the librarian retired and was not replaced (leaving the clerks in charge, all responsibility and no power), the clerks’ jobs were themselves cut from 40 hours/week, 12 months/year to 30 hours/week, 9 months/year, meaning that things like inventory could no longer be done; the 3rd football coach in a row had been promoted to Vice Principal and put in charge. None of them had been entirely sympathetic. The last man looked terrified and fled when he saw the actual books.

I heard over the grapevine that several years after my departure, books were not being reshelved and that the instruction manuals the librarian and I had updated had been thrown out.

Which all leads me to wonder what had happened at Franklin before the library there came its present pass.

At my school there were always attempted incursions and conversions; whatever anyone wanted was what teh library was supposed to become: a special ed center, a detention room (in effect). Only the librarian’s great skill as a bbureaucrat staved off the decay. We had, of course, no local budget, being saved several times by the Feds.

If you have no reliable staff it is impossible to run a library; a library is a highly organized space. If you have no reliable staff you cannot even train student assistants, and if those assistants are not being drilled with principles of order such as the alphabet and basic arithmetic, they cannot work in a library.

The hours question, to me was the most useful measure of what was happening to education at that moment. If the library is the gateway to democracy, then having your job – to run and educated students in the use of a library – cut to the point where it can no longer support you, is instructive.

It’s not often you get to actually watch democracy being relocated upward, out of the working class.

Of course, the background was that Prop. 13. School library reference sets in our district stopped the year the propositon pased; the district was suffering white flight; one school was closed completely, as being too segregated, overcrowding teh others even more; it was in the end a majority-minority disctrict close to one of the major points of entry for illegal immigrants.

No joy there. There was never going to be money for that kind of school…

And ’92 was the beginning of that other great privatization of recent decades, the common wealth, government records and services, being digitized and accessible only by computer.

And computers, even more necessary now, are still expensive if you’re on the minumum wage.

And now we know why other nations in the world continue to do better than the U.S. when it comes to education. At a time when we need more educational resources, that school chooses to go the cheap, entertaining route. This is a disturbing trend, but it seems these days communities seem more bent on turning libraries into arcades/internet cafes. We may as well provide the viewing booths while we are at it. Maybe valet parking too?

Post Post Modern, you seem to be misunderstanding my point. I do NOT generally advocate the bookstore model and I agree that it simply wouldn’t work for a library where the goal is to find knowledge not find a shiny new object to buy. I have NOT been making such changes in my library and by the way, I am not a 20-something and I have had a series of excellent library and vendor jobs and have never had a difficult time finding a job, so you’re not going to be keeping me out of a job…. but anyway, my point was that most high school libraries are very small. People are not using them for serious research. When I was in high school, in an honors/AP curriculum, we used the reference section for some research, and otherwise used a local (million+ volume) college library. Reference works are designed for ease of searching and if you’re talking about a small library, browsing the shelf in the reference section for the topic you need is easy. The rest of the books in most high school libraries are not there for serious or even less-than-serious research. The bookstore model would actually work pretty well simply because of the size of most high school libraries and the types of use they get. And I agree that Dewey and LC are easy to learn. But, on such a small scale, they might not be needed. I think people are just crying out without even really thinking. Again, in high schools, most teaching is done from text books and by the classroom teachers. I got an excellent education but for the most part I used my high school library as a place to spend study hall or find a fiction book. I got 99th percentile SAT scores and was accepted to a college that accepts under 20% of applicants. It was the teachers than made my education, NOT the librarian. (By the way my high school didn’t have an MLIS librarian anyway.) Had my high school library been changed in the way that this school is proposing, I don’t think my education would have been any different.